Posts in Category: encryption

The proliferation of cyberattacks on healthcare providers is well known, with new reports continuing to highlight the problem.

More than 216 hospitals were included in 1,798 breaches between Oct. 21, 2009 and Dec. 31, 2016, according to a report last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Additionally, 33 hospitals, or 15 percent, reported more than one breach. Of the 141 affected acute care hospitals, 52 were major academic medical centers.

How would you like to have to tell 34,000 patients that their data had been hacked? That’s the situation that Quest Diagnostics found itself in recently after hackers stole health information including names, birth dates, telephone numbers and lab results.

GAO Recommends Corrective Action by Department of Health and Human Services
More than 113 million electronic health records were breached in 2015, a year that saw a total of 56 cybersecurity attacks in healthcare alone. That's a 13-fold increase from 2006 to 2015.
The Government Accountability Office isn't going to let those cybersecurity failures go unremarked upon. The GAO last week came down hard on the Department of Health and Human Services, pointing out a number of weaknesses in efforts by HHS to help health plans and other providers protect data.
"HHS has established an oversight program for compliance with privacy and security regulations, but its actions did not always fully verify that the regulations were implemented," wrote the GAO in a report released Sept. 26. The report also called out HHS for giving technical assistance "that was not pertinent to identified problems" in cybersecurity, and for failing to follow up on cases it investigated.
In short, the GAO... read more

LUMEDX does the research for you! Here are some of the top stories in healthcare this week.
Security: Hospital pays ransom to get its data back from hackers
Security experts are concerned that a Southern California hospital paid a $17,000 ransom in bitcoins to hackers who infiltrated and disabled its network, saying that agreeing to the ransomers' demands could set a bad precedent. The hackers had encrypted the hospital's computer network and demanded the ransom to provide a digital decryption key to unlock it.
Healthcare could be major issue in presidential race
The future of U.S. healthcare--especially Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid--will be determined in this year's presidential election, and the candidates are offering starkly different visions. Democrat Hillary Clinton would uphold and expand the Affordable Health Act, while her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, would replace it with a single-payer system. Republican Donald Trump expressed support for some facets... read more

HealthView Analytics™ is a transformative knowledge and technology platform offered by LUMEDX Corporation. For more than 25 years, LUMEDX has been a market leader in cardiovascular information systems (CVIS). The current generation of this system is the Cardiovascular Performance Program™, which utilizes a knowledgebase of best practice insights derived from more than 650 medical centers—combined with analytics embedded in workflows—to boost clinical and financial performance. HealthView Analytics™ also has enterprise programs in Neurology, Orthopedics and Maternal/Fetal Medicine.